Japanese Diary Washes Ashore, Its Mysteries a Gift

By Lisa Schwarzbaum

April 1, 2013

The most tangible character in “A Tale for the Time Being” is a 16-year-old Japanese girl named Nao who never makes an appearance in the flesh. Nao’s lively voice, by turns breezy, petulant, funny, sad and teenage-girl wise, reaches the reader in the pages of her diary, which, as Ruth Ozeki begins to fold and pleat her intricate parable of a novel, washes ashore, safe in a Hello Kitty lunchbox, on a small Canadian island off the coast of British Columbia.

Nao confides, in purple ink under red covers, that she lives in Tokyo; that she’s had a really crummy time in school, being quite hideously bullied by classmates who torment her for having spent her childhood in America; that she loves her 104-year-old great-grandmother, a feisty Buddhist nun; that she worries about her father, who, ashamed by his lack of employment, is prone to hapless suicide attempts; and that she, too, is planning to kill herself.

“I think it’s important to have clearly defined goals in life, don’t you?” Nao asks with a teenager’s chatty assertiveness, cheerily confident that whoever finds the diary is exactly the person meant to read it. “Especially if you don’t have a lot of life left.” For a young person with death on her mind, she’s almost ebullient.

Lucky for Nao, the person who retrieves the lunchbox from the sea is Ruth, an introspective novelist who lives on the island with her mellow, science-minded husband, Oliver, a long way from the couple’s previous home in a bohemian pocket of New York City. And, lucky for Ruth, the diary’s mysteries are a gift for any storyteller, even more so for one feeling stuck about her next project. Each page sends Ruth scurrying in pursuit of clues about the girl’s existence, and about the fate that befell her and her family. One awful possibility: they all perished in the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami that so recently shattered Japan, with ghostly flotsam mementos now circling the globe in a watery churn of currents.

Dualities, overlaps, time shifts and coincidences are the currents that move “A Tale for the Time Being” along: This is a book that does not give up its multiple meanings easily, gently but insistently instructing the reader to progress slowly in order to contemplate the porous membrane that separates fact from fiction, self from circumstance, past from present.

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Ruth OzekiCreditJoshua Bright for The New York Times

It is a not insignificant piece of biography that in addition to being a writer and filmmaker, Ms. Ozeki — herself of Japanese and American heritage, herself named Ruth, herself married to a man named Oliver — is also a Zen Buddhist priest, ordained in 2010. And this third novel, appearing 10 years after “All Over Creation” and 15 years after her more playfully scampish, politically pointed “My Year of Meats,” can be read as a kind of Buddhist meditation of its own, a koan.

Even the book’s title shimmers and shifts shape upon study. Viewed from one angle, it might signify a tale for the moment, temporary and subject to change — a tale for now. For Nao. (Be here Nao, you see?) But then Nao herself explains a time being as “someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.” Which is quite the opposite of something temporary and subject to change. A pretty puzzlement.

Ms. Ozeki has a lot she wants to talk about with the rest of us time beings — including, but not limited to, bird species, global wave cycles, bully culture, Japanese soldiers in World War II, doomed humans who jumped rather than burned to their deaths on Sept. 11, trends in Japanese pornography and the derivation of the word “karaoke.” (It means “empty orchestra.”).

Some of this teaching is done through the pile of scholarly footnotes with which Ruth (i.e., Ozeki) addends Nao’s diary pages, printing Japanese characters and translating phrases and concepts; still more is done by Oliver, whose chief role appears to be that of pedant, explaining the difference between flotsam and jetsam and the distinctions between Canadian and American crows. One neighbor wanders by for what seems to be the sole purpose of calculating the age of Nao’s diary, based on the composition of the barnacles clinging to the covers. Not much else seems to go on in Ruth’s neighborhood.

As for Ruth herself, well, she is as mysteriously intangible and universal as Nao is vivid and distinct. There’s a kind of detached, priestly selflessness to Ruth’s compassion — for Nao, for Oliver, for the whole of human suffering, whether in families, in school, in trouble or in war. And while that calm, embracing kindness (embodied by Ruth on her calm, kind Canadian island) is an appealing aspect of Ms. Ozeki’s writing, it also becomes a barrier to reacting with more immediate passion to Nao’s very real crisis.

Ah, but what if Nao isn’t real? What if she and the harrowing stories she tells, putting on a brave, so-what front (her desensitized, manga-reading classmates are positively sadistic) are just pieces of Ruth’s art, her fiction? And if the “Ruth” and “Oliver” who discuss the contents of Nao’s diary (the cover of which, in a nice touch, bears the Zen-Proustian imprint “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu” — “In Search of Lost Time”) are merely elements in the fiction of Ruth Ozeki, then what’s real for the reader of “A Tale for the Time Being”? The tsunami happened, yes, and Sept. 11, and Japanese suicide bombers who anticipated their deaths in service to their emperor. But every other element in this elusive book is subject to shifting from moment to moment.

That may prove exasperating to those readers who, like this only very occasional meditator, respond more naturally to the sensation of moving on — with a book plot or with life — than to that of sitting still, just being.

A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING

By Ruth Ozeki

422 pages. Viking. $28.95.

Lisa Schwarzbaum, a former critic at Entertainment Weekly, is a freelance writer.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C7 of the New York edition with the headline: Japanese Diary Washes Ashore, Its Mysteries a Gift. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe